ABSTRACT
The four chapters in this section all focus on the nature and evolutionary history of the sexual division of labour in human foraging societies. However, in contrast to past approaches which have seen the economic interdependence of the family unit as the key to understanding the social basis of all Pleistocene hominid evolution, the concentration here is on continuities between human foragers and other primates in types of provisioning behaviour when this is seen as a reproductive strategy (Hawkes), and on discontinuities in the emergence of early anatomically modern human societies in Southern Africa and elsewhere (Power and Watts, Knight, Graves-Brown).
